


Silly Vampire Story

by lateralus112358



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-08 13:08:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18623908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lateralus112358/pseuds/lateralus112358
Summary: contents as advertised





	Silly Vampire Story

Shortly after escaping from an attempt to burn her at the stake for being a witch, Root decides to take a walk. One could be forgiven for conflating the two events, but she’d felt like a bit of air even before the villagers’ torches had appeared outside her window, so it’s more of a fortuitous coincidence than anything else. It’s not the first burning she’s walked out in; something about her seems to inspire conflagratory impulses. 

Ambling away from the mob currently searching for burnable flesh, Root heads to the stables to steal a horse. Which is where she finds the woman who’s been sharing her bed, her body over a another prone form, her teeth sunk into its neck. 

After a moment, Shaw looks up, blood dripping from her face. “You’re not running.”

“You scared away the horses, sweetie.” Root nods towards the empty stalls.

“Usually the vampire thing makes people run.”

Root shrugs. “I already knew you were a biter.” Distant voices make her add, “They’re looking for a woman to burn, and I don’t think they’ll be very picky. Since we’re horseless now, we’d better hurry.”

Some time after the two women leave, the pale man on the ground climbs shakily to his feet, swearing off mysterious women for the rest of his days.

***

“You never go out during the day,” Root says, feet kicking up small puffs of dirt from the road. “Animals are scared of you. It really wasn’t that difficult for me to figure out.”

“Good for you.” Shaw says sourly, glaring down the empty, moonlit road. For as much as she claims not to care, she seems really put off by the lack of dramatic reaction to her revelation.

“Must get lonely,” Root offers, innocently. “Living forever.”

“No.”

“Well, you keep coming back to my house for some reason. Before my house got burned down, I mean.”

“Wasn’t for the conversation.” Shaw replies shortly.

“So just the sex?”

“Yes.”

“Must be hard to find someone who can keep up with you.” Root muses, to no response from Shaw. “Too bad I’m not going to live forever.”

***

Lights far below push away darkness. Night now isn’t really night anymore.

Tiring of the view, Shaw leaps from the edge of the building across to another, twenty feet across, a few stories up. Everything changes. Things die and never come back. A fact that most like her eventually succumb to. 

It takes a particular type of person, Shaw has often thought, to watch the face of eternity. She’s known others like her, older than her, as much as she tries to avoid the company of others, sometimes their paths had crossed. Attachments and loss had drug them down, eventually. Anchors whose chains never tugged at her. She’s the oldest, now, so far as she knows. She suspects she’ll endure long beyond the rest of humanity.

If she even counts as part of humanity anymore. She isn’t sure that she even did when she did. 

She finds herself on a train.

It’s a sort of side effect of immortality, or so she’s come to believe. This way of zoning out for large stretches of time, returning to awareness hours or days or weeks later. It’s not a lack of consciousness thought or action; if she were to cast her mind backwards, she could recall every action she’d taken, but if her experiential continuum were a record, it would be like someone picked up the needle and dropped it somewhere halfway through.

She needs to stop using record analogies. That’s one thing mortals never seem to appreciate; all the learned pithy sayings that have to be unlearned and replaced with new ones.

Root always enjoyed that kind of thing. She’s always been a talker. Much to Shaw’s detriment, since she seemed to be the only one Root ever had any interest in talking to.

She has no one to blame but herself, though. In an act of lustful stupidity centuries ago, she had granted immortality to her tormentor.

She hasn’t seen her in a while. They lose track of each other every now and then, for months or years. Somehow or another Root always manages to crop up again.

***

Eyes closed, Root focuses. She keeps walking, though, because she’s a busy woman with the mental acuity necessary for multitasking. A few inconsiderate people, presumably lacking in the same acuity, fail to deviate their paths around and bump right into her. She doesn’t open her eyes. Presumably, on glancing at her, they decide to move away as quickly as possible rather than continue to bother her. The effect isn’t as distinguished with human beings as it is with animals, but some sort of vampiric emanation tends to make people around her uneasy. She thinks it’s some sort of scent they give off.

Sameen has doggedly maintained that vampirism doesn’t grant any sort of supernatural powers, and while the uneasying they cause seems likely to have a natural explanation, other things do not. Like the tether between her and Sameen. There’s no physical reality to it; she’s not even really aware of its existence in any conventional sense except that she can detect its effect. With sufficient time and focus, she can tug on the thread and pull them back together, as she’s done many times over many separations.

She opens her eyes. This next task requires a bit of attention. Her arrival, unsurprisingly, causes a cacophony. She seeks out a point of silence.

***

Shaw finds herself halfway around the world, wandering a city at night. It must be masochism. There’s no other viable explanation. A leap sends her hurtling upwards, and a slight lean at the peak of her jump sends her down at an angle. She touches down neatly on the roof of a building. Most of her nights are spent in this kind of place. There’s no one around.

Usually.

“Hey, sweetie.”

“Root.”

“I missed you.”

“You always seem to find me, somehow.”

Root shrugs. “It’s just one of my talents.”

“What’s with the dog?” Shaw gestures at the large, strangely calm dog sitting beside Root.

“Found him at the pound,” Root reaches over to pat his head. “Poor guy’s had it rough. Used to be fighter; got his nose all messed up. He can’t smell at all now.”

“What do you need a dog for?”

Root rolls her eyes. “He’s not for _me_ , Sameen.”

Shaw looks at the dog, who looks back at her. “Fine. I’ll take him.” She grabs the leash from Root, and walks across the roof, looking for stairs. Root got the dog up here somehow. She turns back around. “You going to stay up here all night or what?”

**Author's Note:**

> I feel kind of strange apologizing for not having written anything in a while, since it's not as if there's a horde of rabid people waiting for old lateralus to post more stuff, but at the same time I feel a sort of guilt for not having written much. I guess I'm mainly apologizing to myself, while everyone else just sort of stands around and witnesses the spectacle in highly uncomfortable silence.
> 
> Thanks as always to people who read my silly stories!


End file.
